I want to inquire into the social circumstances and cultural conditions in which contemporary representations of black masculinity are produced and circulate. Recognizing the dense intertextual nature of electronic visual media, my aim is to unsettle as much as possible the formal and largely constructed ways in which we see and understand visual representations of black masculinity. Much as one might experience them daily through ads, music television, television situation comedy, and sports, my desire is for this text, in effect if not in structure, to approximate the dense and relentless but always rich and increasingly inseparable experience of visual representations of black masculinity.
Self representations of black masculinity in the United States are historically structured by and against dominant (and dominating) discourses of masculinity and race, specifically (whiteness). For example, the black jazz men of the 1950s and 1960s, notably Miles Davis and John Coltrane, are particularly emblematic of the complex social relations (race, class, sexual) and cultural politics surrounding the self-construction and representation of the black masculine in the public sphere. As modern innovators in musical aesthetics, cultural vision, and personal style, these men challenged dominant cultural assumptions about masculinity and whiteness.
And it was through their music and style that these (largely heterosexual black men) defined themselves in a racist social order. For many of us, jazz men articulated a different way of knowing ourselves and seeing the world through the very "structures of feeling" they assumed, articulated, and enacted -- from the defiantly cool pose and fine vines of Miles to the black and third world internationalism that framed the ceaseless spiritual and musical quest of Coltrane. Davis and Coltrane, like their contemporaries, enacted a black masculine that not only challenged whiteness but exiled it to the (cultural) margins of blackness -- i.e., in their hands blackness was a powerful symbol of the masculine.
The political disturbances and cultural rearticulations of the black masculine these images produce require new contextualizations and different reading strategies. Black heterosexual masculinity is figured in the popular imagination as the basis of masculine hero worship in the case of rappers; as naturalized and commodified bodies in the case of athletes; as symbols of menace and threat in the case of black gang members; and as noble warriors in the case of Afrocentric nationalists and Fruit of Islam. While these varied images travel across different fields of electronic representation and social discourse, it is nevertheless the same black body -- super star athlete...
This article gives critical consciousness, via a semiotic analytical lens, to the representations of Black masculinity on MTV's THE REAL WORLD. My primary objective is to reveal the problematic nature of how African American male cast members are signified on the show, and how these images work to maintain the “typification “ of Black men as inherently angry, potentially violent, and sexually aggressive. Attention is also given to the uniqueness of the show and the ways that this programming format contributes to the hegemonic power of mediated images in reinforcing a general societal fear of Black men.
Black and white characters were also found equivalent in many respects, but program segregation still appears problematic. Blacks were more verbally aggressive, particularly in comedies, but less physically aggressive than warranted by their overall representation.
This essay examines three reality TV shows: MTV's The Real World: Denver, CBS's Survivor: Cook Islands, and the FX network's miniseries Black.White. The essay uses Grindstaff's conceptual framework of news media and television talk shows as a mechanism to examine the way race is constructed on reality TV. It argues that the shows promote a politics of difference,emphasize conflict and division by positioning race as a point of contention among the cast members and dramatize scenarios that reinforce cultural codes and stereotypes. Three points of reference will guide this analysis: First, Jhally and Lewis write that we should more closely examine the ways that media texts purposely, critically and unapologetically confront race in the US. Second, Brummett proposes that media texts are sites of struggle over meaning and that we engage in an unconscious yet powerful struggle over how to interpret them. Third, recent theoretical discourses on race and representation in media call for continued critique of how media marginalize the lived experiences of African Americans, perpetuate crippling representations of marginalized groups, and often render them invisible.
The relationship between Black youth and hip-hop culture is the focus of this article. The author considers how African American youth use hip-hop as a form of cultural capital in everyday settings. By focusing on how Black youth interact with one another at the City Youth Center, the article examines how this particular form of cultural capital may be used to authenticate a Black identity. Finally, how the articulation of this identity is based on traditional gender roles is explored. Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital is heavily relied on to investigate how Black youth construct legitimate racial boundaries in predominately Black settings. The intention is to provide an extension of Bourdieu's theory by examining how Black youth identity is formed and renegotiated in everyday interactions with other Black youth and how this negotiation is mediated through hip-hop culture.
Representations of Black masculinity in popular culture remain a focal point of social science and cultural studies research. Yet, research shows that Black men are negatively portrayed in news stories. Therefore, when a series on Black men, conceived and carried out primarily by a Black journalistic team, was published in a national agenda-setting newspaper, The Washington Post, it was important to question if Black masculinity was represented in this same light or represented in other, more positive ways. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether the series succeeded in reshaping the image of Black men and to what extent it exhibited Jackson and Dangerfield’s five factors of Black masculine positionality. The study found that slightly more than 50 percent of the stories presented a counter-stereotype, showing complexity in Black men’s lives. However, some stories left Black men ‘voiceless on the sidelines’. The study illustrates the difficulties even a well-planned series can face when trying to break out of conventional reporting tendencies
A majority of recent studies finds that black members of Congress are more supportive of blacks' interests than are white members of Congress, even white Democrats. These results are limited, however, exclusively to the contemporary period as scholars have not studied how black members of Congress behaved during Reconstruction, the first era of blacks' descriptive representation. Although black representatives from this era are typically portrayed as having been responsive to blacks' interests, some recent studies suggest that they often supported whites' interests on issues important to their black constituents. Employing a measure of racial ideology as well as a measure of general ideology developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), we investigate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation in the U.S. House immediately after the Civil War, through the use of descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and forecasting techniques. We find that black Republicans during Reconstruction were more ideologically liberal on both general and racial issues than their white Republican colleagues in the South. These results suggest that the linkage between descriptive and substantive representation for blacks is not merely a recent phenomenon, but rather has more general applicability across time.
How America helped create the stereotypes for Black males, and how black members of the congress behavioured and using politics we see how Black characters are seen in Politics.
How can a White supremacist nation, which subjects Black men to ongoing racism and demonization, at the same time admire and worship Black men as athletes? The author argues that key elements of White supremacy and the new racism are reinforced by popular representations of Black male athletes. In viewing far-Right White supremacist and sports cultures, two sites representing seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary racism, the author examines the continuing significance of the historical image of the buck and the obsession with controlling and “taming” Black male bodies. The author examines four common themes that permeate the contemporary construction of Black masculinity and work to justify color-blind racism and inequality: a continued emphasis on Black bodies as inherently aggressive, hypersexual, and violent; concern with taming and controlling Black males; inequality depicted as a product of a deficient Black culture; and the naturalization of White supremacy and White male superiority.
This study updates information on the representation, roles, and occupational portrayal of African-Americans in television advertisements. A content analysis often prime time television shows revealed that black representation in television ads exceeded the percentage distribution of blacks in the population in 1991. The percentage of ads showing blacks in major roles has remained relatively stable over time. However, a black model's level of product interaction was found to be a function of the value of the product, with lower valued products having higher black model-product interaction than higher valued products. This study also compared black portrayal and representation on “typical” versus “black-oriented” television shows. The results indicate that “black-oriented” shows had a greater percentage of all black ads, ads with blacks in major roles, and ads depicting blacks in skilled occupational categories compared to “typical” shows.
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